


Forty days

by i_gaze_at_scully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Quarantine, UST
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-09 11:28:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20852693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_gaze_at_scully/pseuds/i_gaze_at_scully
Summary: After their adventure in Antarctica, Mulder and Scully need to spend forty days in quarantine isolation before they're allowed to return home.(Yes I know that doesn't quite align with how FTF ended but indulge me.)





	1. Days 0-3

**Day 0**

Sleep is a warm blanket, seductive here in the snow. It would be so easy, just to close her eyes and lay here until she went under. The thought is warming her already. Slowly her lids flutter, and a small smile spreads across her lips. Mulder has succumbed, and she sees no reason not to follow as she draws him closer.

She is so very tired. And suddenly, miraculously, finally warm. Drifting. The wind fades, the world fades, and consciousness, persistent as it is, fades too. Her last waking thought is that she never said thank you. She sends him the message and hopes he knows, and that’s all there is. She sleeps.

—

**Day 1**

She wakes. For a moment, she is still out there in the snow. There’s a chill wrapped around her shoulders and it’s all white, so white.

“You’re awake,” she hears.

“Mulder––” She says his name and he’s there, materializes next to her bed, a warm hand covering hers. Warm.

“Hey Sleeping Beauty,” he breathes, a chuckle and a sigh. Scully chuffs and takes stock of the aches and pains coming to rear their ugly heads as she steps more firmly into consciousness.

“Where are we?” She asks. The room is white, small. It’s just the two cots with a night stand between them. Two doors, no windows.

“Sunny Miami, Florida.” He’s still holding her hand, his thumb now tracing soft patterns. His voice is light but she sees the fear lingering behind his eyes. She arches an eyebrow. “Quarantine station,” he clarifies. He gazes at her hesitantly, and she finds herself echoing a phrase from another forgotten time.

“I don’t remember, Mulder. I don’t remember…” But she stops, because there is something she remembers. “You gave me your jacket. We were laying in the snow, and my hair was freezing to my face. You fell asleep first.” She says it as though to defend herself, and he laughs.

“Well, I was a little tired from the before the snow part. You don’t… remember the pods?”

She closes her eyes, shakes her head. She does try though. It just isn’t there.

“I remember,” she recalls as vague phantom feelings cascade through her, “being colder than I’ve ever been, cold from the inside out, like there was ice in my veins.”

She opens her eyes to see Mulder nods slowly, pensively, patiently. “Something like that,” he says, far away now; Scully lets him retreat.

**Day 3**

It’s another two days in quarantine, two days in their two room suite, two days of card games and lame joke-telling and napping (they both napped quite a lot to pass the time) that she’s finally ready..

“I want to know,” she says, stretched out across her cot, not unlike she’d laid on the motel bed in Bellefleur. “Tell me the story, how we got here. All of it.”

He pulls one of the armchairs in from the other room and places it next to her bed. He takes a deep breath, and starts at the beginning. His beginning at least, from her abduction.

She alternates between drawing her gaze to his, staring at the wall behind him, and staring at the bundle of fabric she’s collected in her hand. He tells her nonchalantly how he got to her, the logistics of how he travelled to Antarctica, and she slams her eyes shut involuntarily. He halts in his tracks.

“Scully? Are you okay?” She feels him move closer, feels the dip in the mattress as he sits at the edge. “I can pause,” he offers. “Finish another time.”

He tucks a piece of hair behind her ear so tenderly it hurts, and she opens her eyes.

“Antarctica,” she repeats.

“Yeah,” he replies, and if he’s confused, he doesn’t show it. She’d known though that they came from Antarctica. One of the staff at the facility mentioned it. She hadn’t been able to process it, and it’d grown and grown as a pit in her stomach, how she got all the way there and how they got back until she asked Mulder. And now…

“You literally…” She pushes herself up off her elbow so that they are thigh to thigh, his left to her left, opposite sides of a coin. She laughs. “You went to the ends of the Earth for me.” She chokes a bit on those last words. Lowering her head to rest on his shoulder, she takes a deep breath. “I don’t think I can ever really thank you for that.”

They sit like that a while, no sound but the hum of the fluorescent lights. Her head shifts as he lifts his arm to rest it on her thigh. “You don’t have to,” he says finally. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

And her heart beats. Nearly out of her chest.

“Why don’t we get some sleep and I can finish telling you tomorrow, huh?” His hand is soft on her thigh, his thumb moving in steady swipes, lulling, soothing. “I’m getting tired of listening to myself talk.” She lifts her head purposefully, shoots him her most incredulous look.

“Could’ve fooled me,” she teases, but the levity evaporates when his hand comes up gingerly to cup her cheek.

“I meant it,” he emphasizes, his eyes locked on hers, searching and appealing. “I didn’t think twice, Scully, and I’d do it again.” With that same swiping thumb on her cheekbone, he waits a moment to be sure she’s heard him, believed him, and then removes his hand. Tucking a piece of hair behind her ear again, he laughs. “Maybe next time, try to get stuck somewhere a little warmer.”

Her throat is dry, her head heavy, but she chuffs. “No promises,” she says.

He stands up off of her cot, and it’s almost comical that his departure from that moment is only three strides away to his own cot. He curls up, his back to her, his arms wrapped around his chest like she’s seen him on his couch a number of times.

“Night Scully,” he murmurs.

Lowering her body to the mattress, blood pumps in her ears and she listens to the sound of a heart so full it’s doomed to explode. Explode, or implode. She can’t quite tell.

“Night Mulder.”


	2. Days 6 and 7

**Day 6**

Scully can’t help but feel like she’s in prison, more so than a hospital, certainly more so than a hotel. Food is brought three times a day, stool samples are taken daily, there’s no contact with the outside world. Routine, isolation, unending stasis. But somehow, six days in, they still haven’t run out of things to talk about. She’s sure, had she been stuck here with anyone else, she would have gone crazy. It turns out the lunatic in the cot next to hers is the one keeping her sane.

“Think they’d give us a Sears catalogue for this place if we asked?” He proposes, draped over his cot with his head nearly touching the floor. “I think a good redecorating could really brighten the place up.”

“I’d start with a window,” she replies. They play games like this to keep themselves occupied. So far they’ve redecorated the basement office, Mulder’s apartment, and Scully’s college dorm. “Floral curtains,” she adds.

“Floral curtains?” He protests. “Veto.”

“Oh come on, they’re functional and fash–”

“Where’s the pizzazz, Scully? Take a–Woah.” His arms flail as he tries to right himself.

“Head rush?” She guesses. She’s lazily drawing loops on the notebook they provided, neat curves, up and over, all across and down the page. “Could’ve told you that would happen.”

“Should’ve,” he mumbles, moving from the cot to the armchair across from her. “Alright, I’ll concede the curtains, but then we have to get a fish tank.” That was a non-negotiable when they redid Mulder’s apartment, too, and Scully had no qualms with it.

“Fine, fish tank and floral curtains it is. Mini-fridge in the corner?”

“Dream big, Scully, we have the whole Sears catalogue and Monopoly money to burn.”

“And we have about 50 square feet to work with.”

“Touché.”

They end up with a magnificent bay window, the latest big-screen TV, that space-tested memory foam material for their mattresses, and a foosball table. Dinner that night is undercooked spaghetti and cold meatballs. 

**Night 6**

She’s not unfamiliar with the nightmares, not surprised by them. But her conscious defenses and rationalization do nothing in the dead of night when they come. Nothing at all. 

_Cold. Like there never was warmth; like no sun shines in the sky; like all she is, was, and ever will be is ice, ice, ice. She stares open mouthed at her reflection, open mouthed and screaming but the sound doesn’t carry because air won’t pass through her throat. Air won’t come in, air won’t come out. She stares and screams, cold, alone, and silent._

Hot. She wakes up hot, bundled in suffocating, paper thin sheets, sweat clinging to her skin and cooling quick. She catches the scream before she lets it out, compromises as an involuntary sob manages to escape. 

She buries her face in her pillow, taking care to turn away from Mulder. Maybe he didn’t hear, maybe if she feigns sleep–

“You okay?” He whispers, and she sighs. 

“Yes,” she whispers back, twisting her legs around, shifting but never really settling.

“Okay.” 

**Day 7**

Mulder is restless after dinner. “Maybe we should do some team-building, build that tower of furniture. What d’ya think?” 

But Scully is tired. She’s been hogging the notebook, sometimes looping, sometimes writing her name and tracing it in expanding bubbles that hug the curves of the letters. Today, still reeling from the nightmare, she’s been writing it down, writing it all down. Trying to get it out from within so it won’t haunt her dreams, the phantom of a memory that elusively slips through her fingers every morning. She writes whatever she can think of, whatever she feels, with no filter in an effort to exorcise her demons. 

As he pantomimes, he babbles. “I think we use the cots as a base, but next to each other, for stability, not height. They’re too thin for that anyway, not worth it.” He goes so far as to push them together. Scully keeps her eyes and her pen on her writing. 

“The armchairs will be tricky, but I bet if we use the sheets to tie them to the cots and each other, we’d have a pretty solid start. The lamp of course would be one of the last things, precarious as that is, and then…” He bounces over to her, takes the notebook from her hand, and places it atop the lamp, still set on the floor. “The perfect tree topper.”

“Mulder!” She shouts, springing up from the chair as the pen goes clattering to the floor. Before he can release the notebook, she grabs for it, running instead into the solid wall of Mulder’s chest. He’s holding the notebook away from her, up high on the other side of that wall. 

“Woah, is there something in here I should know about?” His voice and eyes are light, his grin playful, but she ices him out. She steps out of his space, arms crossed, jaw set. Before she’s said a word, he’s held it out in front of himself with his hands up, like he’s surrendering a weapon, and places it on her armchair.

“Thank you.” Smoothing down her scrubs, she sits back down. She doesn’t know where the pen went, but suddenly he has it, has the other chair pulled up beside her and is offering it to her with an open palm.

“I didn’t mean to––”

“It’s fine,” she interrupts. She tucks the notebook under her arm and takes the pen back, slower and less harshly than her words. “Thank you.”

“Sure… I uh, I think I’ll go watch that big screen in the other room. Heard the Knicks are playing.” He offers her an apologetic smile, tries to coax one out of her, but all she can manage to do is nod. He drags the armchair into the other room and shuts the door, providing her some privacy. She lets out a large, tense breath. Picking up where she left off, she writes:

_… can remember is the feeling of his weight in my arms in the snow. When I close my eyes, I can picture his head in my lap like that, somewhere warm, somewhere safe. There are just so many questions, so many unknowns, so ––_

She freezes when she hears a door open, but it’s only Mulder using the bathroom. She hears the shower click on and water hit the tile. 

_… many shadows to illuminate that I don’t know where to start. “You saved me,” he said. “You saved me.” _She pauses, lets the gravitas hit._ He saved me. He came to Antarctica and pulled me out of the depths of a frozen hell to save me. It gives credence to what else he said in the hall, about owing me everything. Owing me everything? God how could he think… There was something in the way he looked at me before I was stung. His words washed over me, his hands anchored me, but the way he looked at me pinned me where I stood. I know him, I know this man. As much as my head tells me his words were a device, a way to keep me from leaving, my heart knows beyond the shadow of a doubt what that look said. _

_What if –_

She had been so absorbed, she didn’t hear the water stop, and now Mulder was knocking at her door. Their door.

“Hey, can I…?” He waits. She hastily closes the notebook and shoves it under her pillow like a teenager hiding her diary from her parents. She rolls her eyes at herself before inviting him in. 

His hair is stuck together in wet clumps, some clinging to his head, some sticking out in different directions. His shoulders are littered with stray droplets. He smells clean and fresh and solid and sound. Without really thinking, she throws her arms around his waist and breathes him in. 

A moment of shock fades into tender arms lacing themselves around her back, pulling her in closer. She feels his nose nuzzle the part of her hair.

“Was it a nightmare?” He asks, and she nods into his chest. “Do you want to talk about it?” She moves her head side to side and he runs his hands up to her shoulder blades. “Okay.”

They stay like that until Scully feels herself flush with embarrassment. When she pulls away, she won’t meet his gaze. 

“Goodnight,” she says, climbing into her cot. 

They’d pondered why, in a two room suite, both cots were in one space. Why not give a little more separation, privacy? Mulder had joked that if she stunk up the bathroom in the other room, he wouldn’t want to be in such close quarters to it. Now she wonders what she’d do without the one and only anchor she has in the ether of dreams, without Mulder sleeping in the cot next to hers. 

“Sweeter dreams,” he offers, and she hears him sink down onto the cot. 

Her heart in spilled ink in a notebook beneath her head, Scully falls asleep and prays that he’s right.


End file.
